It looks like someone found a practical use case for AR that’s not about trying on makeup or catching Pokémon. Ebay today introduced a new AR-powered feature that helps sellers figure out the best box to use for shipping their items to buyers. The technology works with a range of products, the company says, including […]

Here’s a combination of two important electronics workbench tools into a single, cleanly-assembled unit. [uGen] created a DC power supply complete with a plug for the popular TS100 soldering iron, and it looks great! Most of the main components are familiar offerings, like a LM2596 DC to DC buck converter board and a DPS3003 adjustable DC power supply unit (we previously covered a DIY power supply based around the similar DPS5005.) The enclosure is an economical, featureless desktop instrument case whose panels were carefully cut to fit the necessary components. There’s one limitation to the combo: the unit uses a …read more

While it sometimes feels like everyone has a podcast nowadays, the truth is that most Americans still don’t listen to podcasts regularly. The Y Combinator-backed team behind The Podcast App is planning to change that. And yes, that’s the app’s real name. Co-founder and CEO Martín Siniawski said that no one else claimed it first. Siniawski argued […]

During CES, the single piece of electronics I spent the most time with, apart from my laptop and camera, was a Mattel Dungeons & Dragons Computer Fantasy Game handheld. These cheap handhelds, sold as impulse buys at drug stores and Toys ‘R Us (RIP), are the latest thing to be collected and emulated in full by MAME and the Internet Archive.

With the Oppo R15 officially announced in China today, we have a good idea of what OnePlus next phone might look like, since OnePlus often sources designs from its parent company Oppo. For instance, the OnePlus 5 bears a strong resemblance to the Oppo R11, and the OnePlus 5T ended up looking almost identical to the R11S.

The OnePlus 6 is rumored to have a 19:9 notched display, according to a leak from earlier this month spotted by Android Central. Likewise, the R15 has a notch that imitates the iPhone Xs look, hinting that the OnePlus 6 might also sport an interesting haircut.

The rest of the R15s specs include a 6.28-inch, 2280 x 1080 OLED panel with slim bezels, a 3,450mAh battery, and a MediaTek Helio P60 processor; itll sell for…

We’ve all been there. You want to assemble a proper Star Trek: The Original Series landing party prop set, but the TOS tricorders you can find on the market are little more than overpriced toys. Imagine the embarrassment of beaming down to Cestus III with a plastic tricorder. The Metrons wouldn’t have even bothered with the trial by combat with such a sorry showing.

Unhappy with the state of Star Trek props, [Dean O] decided to take matters into his own hands. He purchased a TOS tricorder from Diamond Select Toys and set out to modify it into something a …read more

The world has a new record holder for the largest SSD, and it comes in at 100TB. The Nimbus Data ExaDrive DC100 is a new, massive drive that is currently being tested with select customers and will be available to purchase this summer.

The company says the DC100 will utilize 3D NAND flash memory, which can provide enough capacity to store 20,000 HD movies, or 20 million songs, (if people still downloaded music), and is capable of read and write speeds of 500MB/s. Nimbus Data is also fully guaranteeing the drive for five years without restriction, so if your likely very costly drive kicks the bucket during that period you can get it replaced.

As usual with these massive drives, they arent targeted at consumers, but they do give a…

PlayerUnknowns Battlegrounds is now available on mobile in the US, on both iOS and Android. The game has already been live in Asia for quite a while and came to Canada last week, but there wasnt a launch date for the US.

The mobile version of PUBG was developed by Tencent, the Chinese conglomerate that owns WeChat and invests in games like League of Legends. The mobile PUBG is true to the full game, although the graphics have been pared down for mobile…

eBay has updated its Android app to include a new augmented reality feature that helps you figure out what box size youll need to use to ship your stuff, via Android Police.

The AR feature is pretty simple: point your phone at whatever it is youre trying to ship, and itll superimpose an augmented reality box over it so you can figure out if itll fit. Its got a bunch of standard box sizes built in. The idea is that youll know that you need to get, say, a medium USPS flat rate box from the post office instead of overshooting and having to go back for a bunch of bubble wrap (to pick a purely hypothetical example).

Instagram’s next big Stories feature could let you compliment or trash talk other people’s feed posts, or embed a “see post” button to promote your own. A TechCrunch reader sent us these screenshots of the new feature, which Instagram confirmed to us is appearing to a small subset of users. We’re always testing ways to […]

IBM is hard at work on the problem of ubiquitous computing, and its approach, understandably enough, is to make a computer small enough that you might mistake it for a grain of sand. Eventually these omnipresent tiny computers could help authenticate products, track medications, and more.

This Google Earth image of Antarctica’s South Georgia Island depicts either a UFO that crashed and skidded across the snow or a hunk of ice that rolled along after an avalanche. According to this YouTube video from Secureteam, with 2.5 million views, it’s definitely the former. Keele University physical geographer lecturer Richard Waller suggests it’s the latter. Below, a zoomed-out view of the area. (Space.com)

In 2011, a Mr. Ye and Ms. Xue met in Chengdu, China, fell in love, and married. Going through family photos earlier this month, Mr. Ye spotted a shot of his wife at a landmark in the city of Qingdao. Then he spotted himself in the background. The photo was snapped in 2000 when they were both teenagers.

When I saw the photo, I was taken by surprised and I got goosebumps all over my body that was my pose for taking photos, said Mr. Ye. I also took a photo, it was the same posture (as captured in Ms Xues photo), just from a different angle.

Ms. Xue had visited Qingdao to help her mother relax after undergoing an operation a few months earlier. Mr. Ye had been visiting May Fourth Square in Qingdao because his mother had taken ill after booking herself the trip and asked her son to go in her place.

Qingdao and Chengdu, cities of 9 and 14 million people (respectively), are separated by over 1,100 miles and it takes over 20 hours to drive between the two cities.

YouTube is testing a picture-in-picture type function for desktop, as reported by 9to5Google. For those who have it, the test will mimic whats already available on YouTube for Android and iOS, allowing users to minimize and watch a video while continuing to browse.

If this is available on your account, you can play a video and then click anywhere on YouTube to navigate away without having the video disappear. Instead, the video will be minimized as a floating window in the bottom-right corner of your screen and the video / audio will continue to play. Controls will still be available on the floating video, including play / pause, replay, and the ability to watch the next clip. The videos name will still be displayed underneath, and a…

Atari has renamed its upcoming retro mini-console from the Ataribox to the Atari VCS, according to VentureBeat. The device, similar to Nintendos NES Classic and SNES Classic consoles, uses a design aesthetic inspired by the Atari 2600 Video Computer System. In an interesting twist, the device will not only play classic Atari titles, but it will also play modern PC games (of the less intensive variety) thanks to the devices custom AMD processor with Radeon graphics and a Linux-based OS.

The device was slated to go on preorder back in December, but Atari pressed pause on the sale because the company needed more time to create the platform and ecosystem the Atari community deserves. We still dont have a concrete release date, but…

IBM is kicking off its IBM Think 2018 conference this week with 5 in 5, a collection of IBM Research inventions and technologies that could change our lives in the next five years. If you want to hear a large corporation tell you about AI, blockchain, and quantum computing all in the same breath, IBM Think sounds like the place to be.

Its a little hard to tease out the technology from the buzzwords, but, happily, Mashable spotted this gem: IBM is building the worlds smallest computer. Details are still thin  perhaps well learn more this week  but theres enough info to get excited about.

The computer is 1mm x 1mm, smaller than a grain of fancy salt, and apparently costs less than ten cents to manufacture. To be clear, the…

On Saturday we saw a flood of interesting hacks come to life as more than 100 community organized meetups were held for World Create Day. Thank you to all of the organizers who made these events possible, and for everyone who decided to get together and hack.

Students Learning Hardware Design in Islamabad, Pakistan

The students at LearnOBots took on a slew of great projects during World Create Day like a smart medicine dispenser, electronics that control mains appliances, parking sensors, and a waste bin that encourages you to feed it. The group did a wonderful job of showing off …read more

Samsung has confirmed that it has completed its Android Oreo beta tests and has officially begun sending out the software updates to Galaxy S8 and S8+ devices in the US. After completing extensive testing and beta tests that are standard when we launch a new Android update or product, we are beginning to roll out Android Oreo to select US Galaxy smartphones, starting with the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+, a Samsung spokesperson told The Verge. Galaxy Note8 will follow shortly thereafter.

When exactly youll see this update depends on your carrier; so far, users have reported receiving their Oreo updates on T-Mobile, Verizon, and Sprint. Samsung briefly halted Oreo rollouts last month after the update cause some phones to randomly reboot.

GDC starts this week in San Francisco, and Google is looking to burnish its reputation among game developers with a handful of new announcements. The most newsworthy is Google Play Instant, which allows game demos to be played on Android devices simply by clicking a link, rather than fully installing the game. Its also pointing to improvements in its game ad ecosystem and a new way to set up multiplayer game servers.

The goal of Googles announcements, so far as I can tell, isnt to beat back the conventional wisdom that iOS is a more powerful platform for gaming than Android. Google, of course, doesnt agree with that characterization, noting that it offers the vast majority of top mobile games along with a slew of tools to…